Dan waved the two men good night and headed for his own compact apartment up on the catwalk back inside the hangar.
The thruster’s fuel valve was commanded to open and lock during reentry, he mused as he started up the steel stairs. Somebody sent a bogus signal to the bird.
He stopped halfway up the stairs, his footfalls echoing off the hangar’s metal walls. Which means, Dan said to himself, that somebody really did deliberately sabotage the spaceplane. Hannah’s death wasn’t an accident. It was murder.
Slowly, he started up the stairs again, running it through his mind. Which means that somebody was able to override our command codes and radio the bogus signal to the plane’s computer. Which means that the saboteur had access to our command codes.
As he opened the door to his one-room apartment, Dan came to the inescapable conclusion: Which means that there’s a spy in my company somewhere. A saboteur who wrecked the spaceplane and killed Hannah.
Dan Randolph’s Apartment
The apartment was always neat and clean when Dan came back to it from his day’s work. His office was barely fifty yards down the catwalk that circled three walls of the hangar, but Tomasina, his dour-faced, stocky cleaning woman, always managed to get in and straighten the place, even if Dan was gone for only a few minutes. She cleaned his clothes, washed his dishes, and kept the apartment shipshape, all without getting in Dan’s way. Most of the time he didn’t even know she’d been there, except that the place was spotless and tidy. Once in a while she’d leave him a note in neat, large block letters, ordering cleaning supplies that were running low.
As he undressed, Dan wondered what he should do about the problem he faced. I’ve got a spy working somewhere in the company, he kept repeating to himself. How do I find him? Hire a private investigator? Tell Passeau about it? He could get the FBI in here, I suppose.
Yet he hesitated, uncertain. Who can I trust? he asked his image in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. Joe Tenny, I know. Joe’s put as much of himself into this project as I have. Hannah was like a sister to him. No, more like a grown-up daughter.
As he climbed into his king-sized bed, Dan realized that his list of people he could trust ended with Tenny. He didn’t know anybody else in the eight-hundred-odd men and women he employed well enough to trust them implicitly. Any one of them could be the spy, the saboteur.
Wait, he said as he clicked off the bedside lamp. Whoever it is has to be technically trained. It couldn’t be April, for example. She can run the office all right, but she’s no engineer.
But then he thought, That could all be an act A saboteur wouldn’t have to show his technical skills. Or hers. What do they call them in the spy business? Moles, he remembered. I’ve got a mole in my organization.
He lay on his back in the darkness, his mind spinning. Stop thinking, he commanded himself. Get to sleep. Let your subconscious work the problem. By the time you get up tomorrow morning you’ll probably have the answer you need.
He decided he had given himself good advice, turned over onto his side and closed his eyes. But sleep did not come to him. Instead, he remembered seeing Jane again, with Governor Scanwell.
The fund-raiser in Austin had been such a big bash that Dan thought he’d never be able to speak privately with the governor, but Len Kinsky kept telling him to be patient.
“Half the people in Texas are trying to see Scanwell,” Kinsky said over the buzz and clatter of the crowd as they stood by one of the bars that had been set up across the spacious sweep of the hotel’s atrium.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dan grumbled, sipping at his disappointing Dry Sack. “We’ll hang around all night and never get to talk to him.”
“Wait it out,” said Kinsky. “Hang in there. The drinks are free, aren’t they?”
“And so’s dinner,” Dan admitted.
Kinsky made a sour face to show what he thought of Texas cuisine.
Dan wanted to leave. He didn’t like seeing Jane standing there beside Scanwell. It bothered him, annoyed him. This is the life she chose, he told himself. She’s a politician and she loves all this. Dan wanted to run away.
Instead he weaved through the crush of strangers, nursing his drink and smiling mechanically at the men in their dinner jackets and the begowned and bejeweled women. He didn’t know any of them and none of them knew him. He deliberately moved away from Kinsky, who was talking to a young blonde, a wolfish grin on his face. Wandering through the crowd, Dan wondered why he was wasting his time; he wanted to get away but knew he would stay until the bitter end.
He saw a young redhead who seemed to be equally out of place, alone, clutching a long-stemmed glass of champagne in one hand and an expensive-looking beaded bag in her other. She wore a glittering short-skirted outfit of red and black sequins.
“You’re wearing my high school colors,” Dan said to her, by way of introducing himself.
She was deeply unimpressed, and after a few words Dan drifted away from her. No sense of humor, he decided.
Kinsky found him again when they went into the ballroom, where a sea of round tables had been set up for dinner. Dan and his public relations director sat with eight older men and women. When one of them asked Dan what he did for a living and Dan began to explain it, he quickly changed the subject to golf.
Teams of harried-looking waiters and waitresses slapped dishes onto the table. Broiled steak and baked potatoes, with a medley of overcooked vegetables. Dan glanced at Kinsky: the P.R. director looked like a martyr heading toward the scaffold.
Scanwell made a few remarks from the head table about the wonderful charity this dinner was supporting. Dan hardly heard him. He watched Jane, sitting there beside the governor’s place. She was splendid, completely in her element, smiling and chatting with the others at the head table.
The speeches seemed endless to Dan, a succession of men and women congratulating one another on the wonderful work they were doing. Yeah, Dan said to himself, and not one of them gives a good god damn about the wonderful work I’m trying to do.
He was startled when Kinsky tapped him on the shoulder.
“I told you he’d come through,” Kinsky whispered, leaning so close to Dan that he thought the man was going to stick his tongue in his ear. Kinsky was holding a small white card on which was scrawled the numbers 2335.
“He wants to meet you in his suite,” Kinsky whispered.
Dan took the card in his hand and turned it over. It was the governor’s calling card, complete with the seal of office, his “hotline” phone number, and official e-mail address.
Scanwell didn’t stay for all the speeches. He got up, shook every hand along the head table, and made his apologies for leaving early. Jane went with him.
“Come on,” Kinsky said, nudging Dan again.
Feeling as if he really wanted to get out of this hotel, out of Austin altogether, Dan pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He followed Kinsky up the glass elevator to the twenty-third floor.
When they got out of the elevator a pair of unsmiling uniformed state policemen big enough to play in the National Football League checked their IDs and directed them down the hall. Dan pushed the doorbell button; an aide in a dinner jacket and black tie immediately opened the door and ushered them into the suite. It was richly carpeted, furnished in big plush pieces and polished oak. The drapes were drawn over windows that spanned two walls of the sitting room.
Scanwell was sitting back on the long sofa, his jacket off, his tie loosened, and a cut crystal tumbler of bourbon in his hand.